Reviews

With twenty skillfully written essays Tony Crilly paints a broad-stroke picture of modern mathematics, focusing on some of the most exciting topics. This book is intended for people whose acquaintance with mathematics is limited to their high school years, but who want to know "what all this fuss is about". It is ideal for those who have heard that mathematicians talk about imaginary numbers and unbreakable codes, and want to know how much of it, if any, is true.

When Gems of Geometry arrived through the post it seemed the Gods had conspired to despatch the perfect book for me to review. Like the author, John Barnes, I have a fascination with Edwin Abbot Abbot’s Flatland and spent many childhood hours gluing paper models of fantastical geometric constructions together.

Computing is at the heart of our modern world, but what are its frontiers? This book presents new trends in this fast growing field. Although the topics covered range from spacecraft control to embedding intelligence in bacteria, they all coincide in one fundamental point: the future of computing is a synthesis with nature.

Ian Stewart's latest book guides us through the recent collision of mathematics and biology. This is not a book about mathematics with a bit of biology sprinkled on afterwards – Mathematics of life weaves a history of biology with examples of how mathematics can help solve the unanswered questions that were created along the way. Mathematics, Stewart argues, will be the next biological revolution.

Benjamin Wardhaug's book is entitled How to read historical mathematics and this is precisely what it is about. It is an introduction to the marvellous world of the history of mathematics, aimed at the general public. You will not learn a lot either about mathematics or its history, but you will be much better prepared for reading old mathematical masterpieces after this book.

This is an excellently researched and well-written book. It distinguishes itself from the body of popular science books by interspersing and motivating the mathematics it contains using stories, interviews and conversations with a variety of people, ranging from mathematicians and linguists to mystics. The result is a mixture of journalism, travel literature and mathematical history that will have a much wider appeal than many other accessible texts on mathematics.